I am wondering the best ways of telling a player when they can't enter an area that you need to have perhaps the full game to enter.

RuneScape does this rather bluntly - "you can only do this on a member's world" or something like.

Adventure Quest is a little more in-your-face with a page saying you must be a Guardian and leading you to a purchase page.

Another alternative is just to hide the thing altogether. Only make said door, gate, etc appear if you're playing the full version. This might make the free game easier to play, but it doesn't show the effect of the paid game having a huge extra world very well.

Then another way would be to have some sort of in-game storyline thing replacing "paid accounts" - players who have bought the game become "knights" - then instead of saying "you have to pay to enter here", the game subtly says "you must be a knight", or "you must have the king's favour", or something like that.

Anyway, thought it would be an interesting discussion.

I personally don't like it when a game comes to a screeching halt and rips me out of the experience by reminding me that I'm being a cheapskate

If possible, I would try to hide these areas and weave them into the storyworld as "mysterious", "forbidden", or "forsaken realms", etc. and then when users pay for the full game, you actually show these being unlocked or tie why they are open into the story somehow.

The other alternative is to have the paid version's information OUTSIDE of the main game, but positioned on the title screen or in a HUD or menu somewhere. It's OK for that type of 4th wall breaking information to be there, because the player is in a different mindset at that time.

Those are my thoughts on it anyway.

-Sage

I agree strongly with both suggestions.

There's no way to get around this no matter how delicately you wrap it; the moment money is brought into a free to play game the players will grit their teeth and check their wallet to make sure you haven't somehow pickpocketed them already.
Truth is a lot of people will always look at free to play games with any sort of paid expansion with mistrust, and the most positive attitude seems to be considering them 'pay to have a good character' (perverse as it seems) over pay to play as you can already play freely. Interestingly no-one looks at it this way with a console game that they have to pay considerably more for- they wouldnt just keep replaying the demo.

In such cases, donation may be the way to go. It's not to say you don't have the right, because you do, but in order to get people to pay into something they already have free, it needs to comes with features they really want and are unwilling to sacrifice for the sake of a cheaper alternative

I paid like $8 for some rpg about some swordsman. Never again. Well, it wasn't RTP and it was fairly well-coded, but it was entirely too short, and some of the sidequests seemed undoable.

My favorite way of turning down a player's entry into a sector is meaningful, in-game dialogue. Using runescape for example; If I want to venture further into the depths of Al Kharid, or whatever the desert is called, but I'm not a member, I would have the guard that is spoken to say, "Stop right there! Only someone well-verse in the Lore of runescape is allowed to trespass here! Come back when you have x item!" (And X item can only be required by doing a quest! ... Which can only be accessed if you are a member).

So, there's an idea.

I would love to be able to add this feature to my games in the future. Being able to make players pay for more features in the game sounds like a pretty epic idea to me, and I'm trying to find ways on how that can work with RPG Maker, so I can make a decent amount of money from releasing games on my website.